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“... women’s history, for instance, has meant a clutch of books on below-stairs life: most notably Pamela Horn on The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s history of the British nanny (which puts Churchill’s Mrs Everest firmly in her place), and Merlin Waterson’s account of Erdigg, which tells the entire story of a ...”

“... life are of much more importance to recent British history than liberal empiricism has allowed. Pamela Horn’s study is thorough, sensible social history by a scholar who has delved into a vast range of primary sources. It is a very good example of the type of specialised study on which Arthur Marwick, James Cronin and Jane Lewis have had to depend ...”

“... pockets are embroidered with a woman in a scarlet slit of a skirt, a man with boots and a big horn, and a dead animal. Here is 17th-century filigree from Germany – silver wires twisted into the shape of a heart – and 20th-century jangle from Paris, supplied by Paco Rabanne’s chainmail belt bag.‘Inside out’ it is not. No unexpected overarching ...”

“... with his own reason for detesting Smith: ‘It’s always simmed perfickly simple to me, Mr Worse-horn. If you don’t like blick min, don’t come and live in Ifrica.’ Worsthorne seemed to grasp this elementary point at the time, and later paid me back handsomely with a superb introduction to Margaret Thatcher, so I was depressed to find great tranches of ...”

“... visiting hour, entered the first house she found open, and there, in a voice rivalling the horn, published all the matches intrigues and divorces she had heard of; predicted as many more; descanted on the shameful behaviour of the women and the scandalous profligacy of the men; wondered what the world would come to – then bawled a little on public ...”

“... poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a smack at Pamela – was largely confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that floated it. Gillray worked from a similar ...”